The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Well, it’s—’

  ‘No. You’re dead right. It’s not necessary.’ Alice came stomping back down the chancel steps, a fierce-faced little woman in a pink nylon overall. ‘I yeard as how Jenny Driscoll, God rest her poor soul, used to say there was angelic light around Ledwardine Church, and now I know exac’ly what she meant. It’s crept up on all of us, it has. Like me — I only come to your Sunday night service because somebody said there wasn’t no hymns. Voice like mine, you don’t wanner do no singing if you can help it, do you? Scare the bloody angels off the roof.’

  Alice cackled. Was there a new energy about her, or was that imagination? Merrily sat down in one of the choir stalls. As with most parishes nowadays, there hadn’t been a choir here for years. Some ministers even liked to condense their congregations into the stalls now. More intimate.

  Alice came to sit next to her.

  ‘I’ll be honest, Vicar, some of us wasn’t too sure about you at first. Bit too nervous in the pulpit. Like you wasn’t too certain of what you was trying to say. But it en’t all about preaching, is it? And it en’t all about singin’ the same ole hymns and not hearing none of the words no more. It’s the quiet times, ennit? It’s the quiet times when things starts to happen.’

  ‘Things?’ Merrily grew nervous.

  Alice winked, like there was a great secret floating in the dusty air between them. Brenda Prosser’s voice seemed to echo in the void: Alice said she lost track of time. She said she felt as if everybody there was together… and they were part of something that was, you know, bigger.

  ‘It’s prayer,’ Merrily said, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘Whatever you wanner call it’s all right with me,’ Alice said. ‘It’s like you being the exorcist. We wasn’t sure about that either at first. But when I was talking to Mrs Hitchin, works in the library at Leominster, she says it’s all part of the same thing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So anyway,’ Alice said, ‘I was planning to have a word with you about my nephew, works at the tyre place in Hereford.’

  Merrily looked at her.

  ‘Asthma,’ Alice said.

  Later, when the Ledwardine GP, Kent Asprey, phoned about next year’s village marathon, Merrily knew he wanted something else. This was how things were done in the sticks.

  She took the call in the scullery, sitting at her desk next to the window overlooking the sodden, grey garden.

  ‘I see from my list that you haven’t entered your name,’ Asprey said.

  ‘It’s next April, isn’t it? Anyway, you wouldn’t either, if you had legs as short as mine.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. ‘But you could put me down to be one of the people who pushes drinks at the runners.’

  ‘Righto,’ he said. She could hear him writing.

  She waited, looking across the lawn to the ancient apple orchard which was creeping back into the churchyard so that the church and the vicarage were enmeshed again, in a skein of hoary branches. Apple trees were not graceful and not pretty once the fruit was gone. In the old days, the cider would have been made and stored by now. The cider would see the village through the winter. The cider and the church.

  But no cider was produced here any more.

  ‘Ann-Marie Herdman,’ he said. ‘You’ll have heard, I suppose?’

  ‘It’s remarkable, isn’t it?’ Merrily began to draw an apple on the sermon pad.

  ‘At least you didn’t use the word “miracle”.’

  ‘Not one of my very favourite words, Kent.’

  ‘I… I know Ann-Marie pretty well…’

  ‘I’m sure.’ This was the man who, in the cause of preventative medicine, used to lead groups of women from Ledwardine and surrounding villages on fun runs. Until word reached his wife that, for a select few, the serious fun had begun after the run. ‘So your position on this would be… what?’

  ‘I’d say, let them all keep their illusions. Not often people in my profession get to impart that kind of good news. And if it helps you people fill your churches in these difficult times…’

  ‘That’s very generous of you, Doctor. We need all the crumbs we can get.’

  ‘Entirely off the record, it could be a medical anomaly, but it’s my suspicion that there was an error at the hospital with those first tests. Whether it was technical or a mix-up of names is a matter of conjecture, and we’ll probably never really know, but—’

  ‘You mean Ann-Marie Herdman never had a tumour.’

  ‘I can’t say that, obviously.’

  ‘But you must’ve had a reason to refer her to the consultant in the first place.’

  ‘It’s what consultants are for, Merrily. To take the heat.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But mistakes do occur. It’s inevitable.’

  ‘And yet you told the Prossers you’d done some checks and you couldn’t find evidence of any mix-up.’

  ‘Merrily, in these litigious times…’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Asprey said, ‘I thought you ought to know. I realize it can be quite embarrassing for someone in your position when people latch on to something like this and blow it up into something it isn’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘That was very thoughtful of you.’

  When he hung up, she was looking at the moon over Paul Klee’s rooftops in the print opposite the desk. The moon was very faintly blue. She looked down at the sermon pad and saw that under the apple she’d printed the words SMUG and GIT.

  At dusk, Merrily went to lock up the church, glancing, on the way out, at the prayer board on which parishioners could write the names of people for whom they’d like prayers to be said.

  There were twice as many as usual. One had the final sentence underlined; it said: THIS IS FOR SUNDAY NIGHT.

  Walking back through the churchyard, an isolated spurt of sleet hit her like grit from under lorry wheels, and she hurried under the lych gate.

  What did you do here? What did you do about healing? How did you explain all those times when there was no cure, when the condition worsened? What did you say to them when, after the quiet times, after the unity, after the being part of something bigger… what did you say to them when, after all that, God appeared to have let them down badly?

  Back in the scullery, with about twenty minutes before Jane’s school bus was due on the square, she prodded in the number for Sophie at the Hereford Cathedral gatehouse. Time to make an appointment with Bernie Dunmore.

  ‘Gatehouse.’ Male voice.

  ‘Bishop…?’

  ‘Merrily Watkins, as I live and breathe.’ Bernie sniffed. ‘Well, with slight difficulty at the moment, seem to be developing a cold. Sophie’s just popped across to Fodder to get me some herbal thing which she insists is going to deal with it.’

  ‘Echinacea?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Sudafed, I say.’

  ‘It’s a drug.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Bernie,’ Merrily said, ‘where do we stand on healing?’

  ‘As in…?’

  ‘Spiritual.’

  ‘We brought out an extensive report,’ the Bishop reminded her. ‘It’s called “A Time for Healing.”

  “A Time to Heal”. No, when I say we, I mean we, the Diocese. As distinct from we, the Church.’

  ‘Bugger,’ said the Bishop. ‘Have you no pity for a man with a cold? Your department we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Healing and Deliverance. Remember?’

  ‘Is it, though? My job description says Deliverance. Healing sounds like the C of E spin doctors softening it up. Less bell, book and candle, more touchy-feely caring.’

  ‘You have a specific problem with that?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  The Bishop didn’t reply. He would know better than to quote St Mark’s version of Jesus’s parting message, pre-ascension; as well as the Church’s healing mission, it appeared to advocate picking up snakes, cause of many deaths in the US Bible Belt.

  ‘All right, I’ve been doing this
slightly experimental Sunday-evening service,’ Merrily said. ‘Loose, open-ended. I thought it was working. I mean, it brought in some of the villagers who normally wouldn’t notice if the steeple fell off. Even Jane’s been a couple of times, when the weekend job allows. So… a modest success.’

  ‘What I like to hear.’

  ‘People actually saying they’re reaching something deeper in the way of understanding and awareness. And discovering you can actually learn meditation for free. But it wasn’t meant to be… I mean, it didn’t start out as a healing session. We did pray, though, as you would, for a woman who’d been told she had a malignant tumour. A week later she was told that she didn’t have a tumour at all.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ the Bishop said.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t be more delighted—’

  ‘But you can’t help wondering if it was an answer to your prayers, in the strictest sense.’

  ‘The local GP rang to point out that it was probably a misdiagnosis. Or a technological problem with the scanner. Or an administrative cock-up, or — at worst — one of those very rare medical anomalies. Now, he could be entirely wrong, or covering something up. And he’s massively out-numbered by all those people who would clearly like to think that something did happen…’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘But… Bernie, they’ve started to bring out their sick. They’re recalling lesser ailments prayed for and subsequently eased. This morning I was asked if I’d mind curing someone’s asthma, even though he doesn’t live in the parish.’

  ‘They believe you’re a latent healer?’

  ‘I stress that if it’s happening it’s not down to me, but I suspect there’s a feeling that the Deliverance minister has a hot line. Like the fourth emergency service? The nature of the Sunday-evening service has been… misrepresented.’

  The Bishop breathed so heavily into the phone that it was like the germs were coming down the line.

  ‘You do have a more exciting ministry than most of us, don’t you, Merrily?’

  ‘Maybe I’m missing the humour here, Bishop. Young guy who gets acute asthma attacks and whose aunt is afraid that the next time it happens…?’

  There was a long pause. Down the phone, she could hear the traffic in Broad Street, a door opening and closing, quick footsteps on the stone stairway to the gatehouse offices.

  ‘You know Jeavons is back,’ the Bishop said.

  ‘Jeav—? Oh.’

  ‘I mean, if you wanted to talk to someone about this. Someone who actually knows about it, as distinct from a knackered old admin bloke like me. I was only thinking, with Huw Owen being away…’

  ‘I’ve never met Jeavons,’ Merrily said.

  The Bishop blew his nose. ‘You’re not the first to raise the question of healing lately. Healing groups is the normal approach. I think we all agree it’s better to share the burden. It also raises ecumenical possibilities, particularly with the Catholics, and I’m quite drawn to that. Ah… hold on one moment…’

  She heard another voice. She heard the Bishop saying, ‘Well, I don’t know how to work the blessed thing.’ She thought about Catholic priests she knew and how they’d react to the idea of working with a woman.

  Bernie came back on the line. ‘Sophie goes out for five minutes, place ceases to function. Did I mention Jeavons?’

  ‘He’s in Worcestershire, right?’

  ‘He’s been abroad. Semi-retired now, of course. Rather prematurely. Few years ago, there was a move to fast-track him into purple — view to Canterbury, one suspects. The little greaseball Blair was keen, for obvious reasons. Red faces all round when Jeavons tosses it back at them and says he’ll retire instead. What he wanted, we discover, was his freedom, to pursue his specialist interests, hover over psychic surgeons in Chile.’

  ‘At the Church’s expense?’

  ‘Dunno. My information is that he’s back in the country and available as a consultant to selected clerics — although I was once told it would be unwise to refer just anybody.’

  ‘Huw talked about him once,’ Merrily recalled. ‘Only—’

  ‘Because, if anyone’s on the edge of a crisis, Jeavons has been known to tip them over.’

  ‘Only, Huw reckoned he was mad,’ Merrily said.

  Since the days when hundreds of medieval pilgrims had dragged their crippled limbs to the shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe in Hereford Cathedral, the Church had become increasingly uncomfortable about healing. You prayed for sick people, you might even light a candle, and if there was a cure you thanked God. Beyond that, a certain wariness crept in. Not strictly our thing.

  In which case, what was the Church’s thing? The way congregations were crashing, it was clear that this was a question not going unasked. While Jane was changing out of her school gear, Merrily dug out the report: ‘A Time to Heal: A Contribution towards the Ministry of Healing’. In his introduction, George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, referred to ‘Our Lord’s injunction to heal the sick,’ and suggested that the report might be studied and reflected upon and considered for action ‘as appropriate in dioceses and parishes’.

  As appropriate. Merrily smiled.

  In relation to parishes, the report recommended that clergy involved in healing should consider combining their resources with those of doctors, community nurses and carers operating according to a ‘working theology’ of the Ministry of Healing.

  Oh, sure. Like Kent Asprey and Lorraine Bonner, the district nurse, who maintained she’d seen too much of life to be anything but an atheist.

  The report was sniffy about some healing services. Lack of preparation, misunderstandings, unjustified claims and emotionalism leading to subsequent disappointment. It was more supportive of what it called Intercessory Groups, in which a number of ‘instructed persons’ met regularly to pray for the sick.

  Laying-on of hands, by the minister, in the context of a normal service or Eucharist was also accepted, as were Services of Penance, underlining the healing benefits of forgiveness.

  Merrily looked up Canon Llewellyn Jeavons in the phone book. There was a Jeavons L.C.D. at Suckley.

  Mad, Huw had said, without explanation.

  She knew where Suckley was — a rambling hamlet not far over the Herefordshire border and not far at all, in fact, from the Frome Valley where Lol Robinson was still living out of suitcases in the granary at Prof Levin’s recording studio.

  Merrily sometimes caught a frightening image of herself in twenty years’ time. It was in sepia: this small, monklike person in the bottom left-hand corner of the huge old vicarage, hunched over the desk. Dark. Chilly. Cramped. Very much alone.

  She saw it quite often these days. Sometimes it was so detailed, and yet so stark, that it was almost like an engraving.

  That night, building a fire of apple logs in the sitting-room inglenook, Jane said, ‘You don’t make fires like this when I’m not here, do you? Like last weekend, for instance.’

  ‘I was busy.’

  ‘I think you probably didn’t come in here even once. I could almost smell the damp.’

  ‘Saturday night, I wrote the sermon. Sunday night, we had the service and then the Prossers came to tell me about Ann-Marie. Wasn’t really worth it afterwards.’

  The paper and the kindling flared yellow. Jane, on the hearthrug in her jeans and an overstretched white sweater, looked like a little girl again. Seventeen now — scary.

  ‘It’s just…’ The kid positioned a small log over a mesh of thorny kindling. ‘I like this job. I like Stanner Hall. You get to meet people — different kinds of people. I just don’t like to think of you all alone here. Like everywhere dark, except the kitchen and the scullery.’

  ‘I’ve got the cat. And, of course—’

  ‘Let’s keep Him out of this,’ Jane snapped. ‘The point is, in under two years I’ll probably be gone, whether it’s university or… whatever. But I might be gone for like… for good. And you’ll be kind of lodged down in that scullery l
ike the last Jelly Baby in the jar, writing your sermons into the empty night.’

  Actually, it was going to bed that was the worst time: putting out the bedside light, knowing that the attic apartment directly above you was empty. Thinking of all the empty rooms and all the people who had been and gone. Jane’s dad, long gone. Jane’s dad — that was how she thought of Sean now, as though Jane was the best thing he’d done in his foreshortened, corrupted life.

  Biting her lip, she stood over Jane and bent and kneaded the kid’s shoulders. ‘Two years is still a long time.’

  ‘I used to think that, but it isn’t.’ Jane looked up at her. ‘You’ll be nearly forty then. Have you even thought about that?’

  ‘Too old for sex?’

  Jane pulled away. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘It was a joke. How are things at the hotel?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. You’re here in this mausoleum, on your own every weekend, and Lol’s twenty miles away with no real home at all, and he can’t get near half the time because of appearances and the Church and all that hypocritical bollocks. I mean, if you were gay — if you were a lesbian — nobody would—’ Jane broke off, blushing, probably remembering a certain misunderstanding.

  ‘And there’s the question of restarting Lol’s career,’ Merrily said. ‘The album out in March, the chance of a tour…’

  The kid smiled maliciously. ‘And groupies.’

  ‘Do they have groupies any more?’

  ‘Just trying to inflame the situation. Groupies and Lol doesn’t arise.’ Jane looked up again, an apple glow on her face. ‘But you have to do something soon. Face it, most people know about you and him now, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, but cohabiting in the vicarage might just be a step too far. And I don’t think he’d want that anyway. Now that he’s finding his feet.’

  ‘You’re so… unimpulsive. You piss me off sometimes.’

  ‘It’s what I’m here for,’ Merrily said.